Resilience Engineering & Operations Director

Role Overview

Role:

We are looking for a Resilience Engineering & Operations Director, US East, to lead our Resilience Engineering and Operations team in College Park, Maryland. In this role, you will lead the team responsible for keeping IonQ's hosted quantum computers running reliably for customers, while improving resilience, performance, throughput and operational efficiency across the fleet.

This is a technical leadership role, not a purely administrative one. You will lead a team of Operating Physicists, engage credibly with complex trapped ion systems, and use sound judgement to balance uptime, technical risk and long term improvement. You will work closely with engineering, physics and operations partners, and your team's insight will help shape how current and future systems are supported in the field.

You will also play an important part in building our follow the sun operating model alongside colleagues in Europe. The function is still maturing, so this role needs someone comfortable building process, improving handoffs and creating clarity in a fast moving environment.

Responsibilities:

In this position, you will lead day to day fleet support, incident response, operational readiness and continuous improvement for IonQ's hosted quantum systems, as well as installation and maintenance of our internal systems at the College Park office. You will set direction for the team, support individual growth, and make sure the group can respond effectively to both immediate operational issues and longer term reliability challenges.

You will work at the intersection of operations, engineering and physics, helping the team resolve complex issues, strengthen fleet performance and feed operational learning back into future designs, tooling and automation. Early on, you will put durable operating processes, metrics and prioritisation habits in place so the team runs with clear ownership and escalation.

Key responsibilities include:

• Lead, develop and grow a team of Operating Physicists who keep IonQ's hosted quantum computing fleet running reliably
• Own team strategy and execution across fleet operations, incident response, operational readiness, deployment support and continuous improvement
• Manage priorities, schedules, inventory, sparing and operational planning to support reliable system performance
• Partner closely with engineers, physicists, senior leaders, vendors and customers to resolve issues and influence future designs
• Define and track performance metrics for the team, building a culture of technical rigour, learning from incidents and strong operational judgement

Requirements:

To be successful, you will need a strong technical background in complex experimental, optical or physics led systems, alongside experience leading teams in operational or engineering environments. We are looking for someone who combines hands on technical credibility with sound people leadership, and who is comfortable creating structure where it does not yet fully exist.

You should be able to identify issues quickly, work effectively across disciplines and help a team operate with clarity in a fast moving, highly technical business. Prior quantum computing experience is not required; we care more about how you lead, how you reason about reliability and how quickly you learn. The role is based on site in College Park, and supporting a live fleet means the working pattern includes some on call responsibility.

You’d be a great fit with:

• A degree in Physics or a related field, or equivalent experience in a similarly deep technical environment such as optics or complex experimental systems
• 8+ years of technical leadership and people management, including leading physicists, scientists, systems engineers or similar specialists
• Direct experience in reliability engineering, resilience engineering, incident management or Learning From Incidents
• Experience with automation, calibration, maintenance or operations management for complex technical systems, ideally in on call or service oriented environments
• Strong communication and judgement, with experience balancing time, cost, quality and operational risk across functions

The total compensation package includes base salary, bonus, equity, and a range of benefits available on our career site.

Wage Transparency: 212000 - 312000 USD